“We are disappointed with the Department of Interior’s unilateral decision
to withdraw from USEITI. We are dismayed by the DOI’s characterization that
meeting the EITI validation standard is somehow stymied by US law. In
reality, the refusal of all but a handful of the involved companies to
disclose tax payments – not US law – rendered the US unable to meet the
basic level of transparency required by the EITI. To be clear, US law does not prevent oil, gas or mining companies from
voluntarily disclosing their taxes – common practice in the dozens of EITI
implementing countries,” said Jana Morgan, Director of Publish What You Pay
– United States. “In fact, Houston-based oil company Kosmos Energy
voluntarily
disclosed
their tax payments to the US government last year. However, with the
support of the American Petroleum Institute (API) companies like Chevron
and ExxonMobil have consistently refused to comply with the EITI
requirement to disclose their federal tax payments.”

Efforts to implement USEITI were dealt a direct blow in the earliest days
of the Trump administration, when Congress passed a bill to repeal the
implementing rule for the Cardin-Lugar anti-corruption provision. The
regulation required all US-listed oil, gas and mining companies to publicly
disclose their project-level payments in every country of operation,
including the United States. Chevron and ExxonMobil have long touted their
participation in the EITI as evidence of their commitment to transparency,
even sitting on the International Board. Yet these companies, along with
Big Oil’s lobbying arm, API, have fought for years to undermine
Cardin-Lugar. These efforts amounted to an
act of bad faith according to USEITI multi-stakeholder group by-laws
and should have resulted in the the removal of API and others from the
multi-stakeholder group.

“It is apparent that companies like Exxon and Chevron, along with API,
support transparency in name only,” Morgan continued “If companies want to
demonstrate their commitment to transparency and the EITI, they should
report taxes and other payments consistent with the international
transparency standard that they not only agreed to, but helped establish.”

The Obama Administration demonstrated groundbreaking leadership in 2010 by
passing the Cardin-Lugar provision as part of the Dodd-Frank Act. The rest
of the world soon followed, and now similar laws are being implemented in
30 countries around the world. “This latest move by the Trump
Administration further deteriorates US influence in this space, and
represents another embarrassing backwards step for an Administration that
has proven to be weak on combatting corruption,” said Morgan.

(2) The EITI is a global anti-corruption initiative that requires oil, gas,
and mining companies to report payments, including taxes, for access to
natural resources, and that governments report the revenues they receive
from the sector. Individual countries sign on to the initiative, and
implementation of the EITI standard is carried out in consultation with a
multi-stakeholder group that consists of representatives from government,
industry, and civil society. In the United States, the implementing agency
for the EITI is the Department of the Interior.